| Description |
1 online resource (xiv, 327 pages) |
| Contents |
Introduction: Augustan poetry and the irrational / Philip Hardie -- pt. 1 Civil war : expiation and the return of the repressed -- My enemy's enemy is my enemy : Virgil's illogical use of metus hostilis / Elena Giusti -- Orestes, Aeneas, and Augustus : madness and tragedy in Virgil's Aeneid / Stefano Rebeggiani -- The night of reason : the Esquiline and witches in Horace / Mario Labate -- pt. 2 Order and disorder : counting and accounts -- Beyond 'cosmos' and 'logos' : an irrational cosmology in Virgil, Georgics 1.231-58? / Christian D. Hass -- The magic of counting : on the cantatoric status of poetry (Catullus 5 and 7; Horace Odes 1.11) / Jürgen Paul Schwindt -- Under the influence : Maecenas and Bacchus in Georgics 2 / Emily Gowers -- pt. 3 Reason and desire -- Apollo in Tibullus 2.3 and 2.5 / Jane Burkowski -- The ars rhetorica : an Ovidian remedium for female furor? / Jacqueline Fabre-Serris -- Augustan gothic : Alexander Pope reads Ovid / William Fitzgerald -- The madness of elegy : rationalizing Propertius / Donncha O'Rourke -- pt. 4 Self-contradictions : philosophy and rhetoric -- The value of self-deception : Horace, Aristippus, Heraclides Ponticus, and the pleasures of the fool (and of the poet) / Mario Citroni -- Irrational panegyric in Augustan Poetry / S.J. Heyworth -- pt. 5 Virgilian figures of the irrational -- Caderent omnes a crinibus hydri : the problems of the irrational in the Juno and Allecto Episode in Aeneid 7 / Severine Clement-Tarantino -- Adamastor and the epic poet's dark continent / Philip Hardie |
| Summary |
he establishment of the Augustan regime presents itself as the assertion of order and rationality in the political, ideological, and artistic spheres, after the disorder and madness of the civil wars of the late Republic. But the classical, Apollonian poetry of the Augustan period is fascinated by the irrational in both the public and private spheres. There is a vivid memory of the political and military furor that destroyed the Republic, and also an anxiety that furor may resurface, that the repressed may return. Epic and elegy are both obsessed with erotic madness: Dido experiences in her very public role the disabling effects of love that are both lamented and celebrated by the love elegists. Didactic (especially the Georgics) and the related Horatian exercises in satire and epistle, offer programmes for constructing rational order in the natural, political, and psychological worlds, but at best contain uneasily an ever-present threat of confusion and backsliding, and for the most part fall short of the austere standards of rational exposition set by Lucretius. Dionysus and the Dionysiac enjoy a prominence in Augustan poetry and art that goes well beyond the merely ornamental. The person of the emperor Augustus himself tests the limits of rational categorization. Augustan Poetry and the Irrational contains contributions by some of the leading experts of the Augustan period as well as a number of younger scholars. An introduction which surveys the field as a whole is followed by chapters that examine the manifestations of the irrational in a range of Augustan poets, including Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and the love elegists, and also explore elements of post-classical reception |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Online resource; title from home page (viewed on October 14, 2015) |
| Subject |
Latin poetry -- History and criticism
|
|
Irrationalism (Philosophy) in literature.
|
|
Latin poetry
|
| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| Author |
Hardie, Philip R., editor.
|
| ISBN |
9780191792250 |
|
019179225X |
|
9780198724728 |
|
0198724721 |
|
